Galvanized coatings comprising essentially zinc are conventionally used for the effective protection they provide against corrosion, whether in the automotive sector or in the construction industry, for example.
In the following text, a zinc coating means a coating of pure zinc, potentially including the unavoidable impurities acquired during production and present in trace quantities.
The sheets coated in this manner can then be cut and shaped, for example by stamping, bending or shaping, to form a part that can then be painted to form a paint film on top of the coating. This paint film is generally applied by cataphoresis.
The methods most frequently used to deposit a zinc coating on the surface of a steel sheet are galvanizing and electrogalvanizing. However, these conventional methods do not make it possible to coat grades of steel that contain high levels of oxidizable elements such as Si, Mn, Al, P, Cr or B, which has led to the development of new coating methods, and in particular vacuum deposition technologies such as jet vapor deposition (JVD).